triathloning, writing, living the dream

Ready?

How does one prepare for one’s first (actual) half-Ironman at the same time you’re launching a website? Mostly, you don’t train much this week, eat a lot of desserts and practice your mental self-talk.

The run at the race is two loops and when I was doing my short run today, which was about as far as it’ll be to the first turnaround on Saturday, I started thinking about two loops. Really, when I was halfway through my run I was halfway to the turnaround point, which is halfway through the first lap, but the first lap is WAY more than halfway done with the half-marathon, because the second loop is much shorter. So, really, I was pretty much almost done with the run.

Practice saying shit like that until you almost believe it. Also practice: “I am the slowest person ever, everyone is laughing at me. I will look so dumb if I don’t go faster.”

This guy (for this story in the newspaper about me and triathlon) was asking me what I tell myself during races and I said I tell myself that I am the slowest person ever, no one has ever swum slower than me, I suck, everyone else is already done and I’ve been left out here to drown. And he was like haha, what do you tell yourself then, how do you bounce back? And I was just like uh, no, that’s pretty much it.

Steve and I have also made the scientific determination that I eat more desserts than anyone we know. I’ve realized I probably need to cut back on the bowls of melted cookie dough. I mean I’m not stupid enough not to know why I feel like shit after eating a bowl of cookie dough, but I am stupid enough to do it again. I was telling my dad that all the really fast girls are like 10-15 pounds lighter than me and he said, “But, how fast do you really want to be?”

3 thoughts on “Ready?”

Good luck this weekend Kelly. You’ll have plenty to compain about during your race – it starts around mile 30 on the bike where you realize that sprint races are pretty awesome and that you don’t even need a gel to get through them. The nice thing about halves and self doubt is that you don’t really run out of stuff to complain about in 4-5 hours. They’re also not laughing at you, they’re going – that girl is really white.